Re: New statistics about upload activity of the team
Hello,
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 6:30 AM, Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> at DebConf9 I was discussing with some people that graphing the activity
> of postings to the mailing list which is showed at the entry pages of
> the web senitinel[1] are not that relevant as the actual uploads the
> team members did. I now implemented a way to also show the upload
> activity.
> Any hints are welcome.
Asking scientists for hints about analyzing data . . . sounds scary...
It would be interesting to see a single number representing the
"health" of a team over time. I propose using something like the
Hirsch index [1] (an index which invokes widespread unease when
applied to evaluating faculty candidates and promotion while at the
same time invoking widespread use.)
An h-index moving average (over a year, perhaps) shows if the team is
growing both in size and in sharing of workload. If a single person is
doing all the work, then the team isn't behaving like one, and would
yield a low h-index. Similarly, to a large team made up of one-time
uploaders isn't healthy for long term stability.
I assume the data is only for the top ten uploaders since 2001, and
there there are others that are new and haven't made enough uploads to
make the top 10 over the past decade. However, for the case of this
example, I'll pretend like the 10 uploaders listed at [2] make up the
entire group of uploaders to debian-med.
med:
2001 2
2002 2
2003 2
2004 2
2005 2
2006 4
2007 4
2008 8
2009 6
2010 6
I do not believe the above numbers are correct, because it is
excluding uploaders who may have significantly contributed recently
(e.g. ~15 uploads in each of 2009 and 2010), but did not make 30
uploads over the decade to be represented in the data set. For
example, if two such people existed, 2009 and 2010 would have
h-indexes of 10 - clearly showing growth and improved team health over
the past decade. The above data is an example and would have to be
compiled using every uploader's data to give the correct number. It
will probably yield higher numbers in 2009 and 2010 as more people
contributed.
That could be a useful metric for other Debian teams to identify if
the team is behaving more or less team-like over time.
Cheers,
Scott
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
[2] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/uploaders_debian-med.txt
Reply to: